


Almost Human

by Laylah



Series: Creature Comforts [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Comfort Sex, F/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-14
Updated: 2006-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 09:35:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Were you ever human?” she asks, before she can stop herself. The snake again — waiting for hours, for days, and then striking between one heartbeat and the next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost Human

It was his eyes that captivated her first, burning fierce and alien in his prison-white face. She didn’t even need the demonstration he gave the others to know the truth — he wasn’t human.

But neither is she, anymore. She hasn’t asked him yet whether he was born human like she was, or if he’s always been what he is now: impossibly strong and fast, able to shift his skin to something blue-black and impenetrable, able to heal from _anything_ in minutes. She doesn’t ask when the whole team is together, because she doesn’t know if he wants all of them to know. And she doesn’t ask when they’re alone because she always seems to be distracted by his hands or his mouth or his cock — or, most often, all three.

She knows the others do it too. It ought to make her jealous, and she blames her reptile nature for the fact that it doesn’t. When she sees him disappear with Law for an hour, or hears the little whimpers of Dorochet accepting his alpha through the wall, sometimes she wishes it were her turn, but she doesn’t wish they would stop. It would be pointless to waste time hoping for it.

The only time it bothers her is when he goes with the alchemist. That makes the whole team uncomfortable, when the walls shake and they hear Kimberly’s laughter over the sharp sound of an explosion. She’s seen the rooms afterward, once or twice, reeking of burnt flesh and marked with a blast radius in dry blood and greasy ash. It doesn’t bear thinking about too closely.

But it keeps Kimberly interested enough to stay with them, and Greed never seems really hurt by it, so Martel figures it isn’t her place to say anything. The alchemist brings his own set of skills to the team, just like the rest of them. And he is, technically, the only one of them who’s human — even if Martel would rather depend on any of the others to be humane.

It’s late tonight when the door opens, and she’s already sitting up in bed, knife drawn, when she recognizes the tall, lanky form in the doorway.

“You look happy to see me,” Greed says, leaning on the doorframe, moonlight glinting off his sharp grin.

Martel manages to smile back. “Come over here,” she says, gesturing with the knife, “and I’ll show you how much.”

She doesn’t even see him move, but all at once he’s in bed beside her, knife blade skating harmlessly off his stomach. “I thought you’d never ask,” he murmurs, slipping long arms around her, his teeth worrying delicately at her earlobe. His hair is wet and his skin smells like soap, which means that he washed somebody else’s sweat off his body before he came looking for her. If this were anything ordinary, she thinks she would be upset about that, but there’s nothing ordinary about either of them, and it means that he might stay afterward, so she just smiles, breathing him in.

When he touches her, there’s not a cold-blooded thought in her head — everything melts, and all she does is feel, sense, be here now. She lets the knife fall, off the side of the bed somewhere, and twines her arms around him. He’s warm and sleek and muscular, and she can feel his skin changing from armored back to normal under her hands.

“Why do you do that?” she asks, tracing the retreating line of his shield down his back.

“Because,” he says, arching shamelessly into the touch — like the cat she faintly remembers having, back before the war, demanding to be petted — “I’m so much more sensitive this way.” His hands slide under her shirt, dragging it up over her head and tossing it off the side of the bed to join her discarded knife.

“Mmm.” She runs her fingers through his hair, tugging his head down toward her breasts. “Feels good from this side, too.”

“Of course it does,” he says, purring the words into her skin, faint ghosting heat. She can’t even bring herself to mind his arrogance, because he’s right — of course it feels good when his skin rubs warm and smooth against hers, when his mouth closes wet and hot on her breast, when his teeth graze sharp and hungry over her nipple. It’s like being human, like being real again. And if it sounds more like she’s hissing than moaning, Greed doesn’t seem to mind.

“Please,” she says, when one of his hands slips down over her stomach and inside the waistband of her fatigues.

“Please what?” he asks between swipes of his tongue. “I’ll give you anything you want, baby, but you have to ask for it.”

Martel reaches down, extending her arms in a long sinuous flex, and starts to unbutton his leather trousers. “Then take your pants off,” she says. “I want you in your own skin.”

Greed laughs. “Then shed yours, gorgeous.”

She lets go of him, hands flying to her buttons, skinning out of her fatigues and underwear as he squirms out of his clothes beside her. He’s as much of a snake as she is, in completely different ways. He’s warm and vibrant and playful where she is cool and calm and patient, but his body is one long coil of muscle, and when he wants something that hunger is the only thing that matters. And he was in prison far longer than they were — she saw him start in surprise the first time Dorochet turned a radio on, and she’s noticed how careful he is not to ever be the one behind the wheel of the jeep.

“You’re thinking too much again, aren’t you?” he asks, slithering back up her body to look her in the eyes.

“Were you ever human?” she asks, before she can stop herself. The snake again — waiting for hours, for days, and then striking between one heartbeat and the next.

He blinks in surprise. “No,” he says after a minute. “I’m a homunculus, not a chimera.” His long fingers knead the tense columns of muscle on either side of her spine. “Does that bother you?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “It bothered me that I didn’t know.”

And that’s enough conversation. It’s time to stop talking and start feeling again. She leans in to kiss him, sloppy and rough, her tongue pushing past his lips. There’s a sharp, bitter taste in his mouth, and she wonders who it is — but it doesn’t matter, not really, because he trusts her with his secrets and he still comes to her like this, hard and hungry. He still touches her, strokes her, caresses her like she’s a real person — licks his way down her throat, between her breasts, over the flat plane of her stomach….

“Let me hear you, lovely,” he says, as his hands part her thighs, and she shivers at the heat of his breath — and then his mouth is on her, slick hot and maddening, his tongue tracing lazy circles around her clit. She can’t _not_ make noise, little moans and whimpers as she rocks her hips, trying to make him do it right and stop teasing.

“Anything you ask for,” he reminds her, one hand smoothing over the arch of her hipbone, ridiculously strong, pinning her to the bed.

“You _know_ what I fucking want,” she says, struggling in his grip.

“And you know I want to hear it,” he replies, his other hand sliding up between her thighs and waiting, fingertips just inches from where she wants them.

“Then fucking do it,” she whispers, and she clenches her fingers in the sheets so she won’t snarl them in his hair. “Put your fingers in me and — ahssss –” she loses coherence for a minute as he does what he’s told — “sssuck me off.”

He hums a little pleased noise against her skin, and then he _does_ : his fingers slide deep inside her, wasting no time as they find the right angle, the right pressure to make her moan. And his mouth closes around her clit, licking and sucking just exactly right, and all she can do is shake and flex and gasp. Nothing else is like this, so hot and immediate, hungry and demanding and right now real right now — shuddering and thrusting and hissing and — _yes_ — and it washes over her like a lick of flame, too much for half a second and then perfect, all she wants, gold and warm and shattering _now_.

And because he’s Greed he doesn’t stop until she’s nearly sobbing, until she doesn’t think her body can take any more, until she grabs him by the hair and drags him away. He laughs, his fingers sliding out of her, and when he says, “Ready for me?” his voice is honey-thick and savage.

“Fuck me,” Martel says, because she knows he likes to be told to do what he already wants. She lifts her legs and wraps them around his waist as he sinks into her on one smooth, fast stroke. A flex of her thighs pulls him deeper, and he growls with pleasure.

“So sweet,” he tells her, and nobody but Greed would call her that now — and for an instant, it is. He slides his hands under her back and _lifts_ , pulling her up with him, and her legs unfold as she moves, knees coming down to rest on either side of his thighs so that she’s sitting in his lap, riding him.

She hears herself starting to make noise again as he thrusts up, deep into her, and the little hiss at the end of her shuddering breaths is embarrassing enough that she kisses him to silence it. He tastes like her now, less bitter and more earthy than before, and it makes her kiss harder, hungry, his teeth cutting her lips.

He pulls back at the taste of her blood. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he says, gently chiding. One hand strokes down her cheek to her mouth, wiping the blood away. “I can’t have my people getting injured over a little fun. You don’t heal the way I do.”

She smiles, though she’s not sure whether she’s more pleased by the fact that he worries about her getting hurt, or the fact that he thinks of them as people. “I’ll be careful,” she says.

“Good.” He wraps his arms around her, low, his hands on her hips, dragging her down on him hard. “I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

He wouldn’t want to lose her. Nobody else thinks so anymore. Since the laboratory — since before the laboratory, since before Ishbal, since she joined the goddamn special forces unit in the first place, she’s been expendable. But not to Greed. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promises, and she twines her arms around his back.

They’re going slower than usual, this time, like he’s not in a hurry, like he doesn’t _need_ to get off quite so badly — like what he needs is something completely different now, more like what she does, a chance to savor every moment and really feel it. His face is buried in her hair, and when she rocks against him — using the snake’s liquid flexibility almost unconsciously, shaping her body around his — his breath hitches in her ear.

“Like that?” she asks. He always gets enough of what he wants to make it worthwhile, but she wants to offer more than that this time, wants to make it better than just enough, wants to make it matter to him the way he matters to her.

“Yes,” he breathes against her skin, and she could swear there’s real feeling in it. “Like that.”

So she does, sliding sleek and sinuous against him, letting the rhythm turn slow and hypnotic, and when he moans softly she says, “Yesss,” and the hiss doesn’t even bother her this time. He rocks into her, and she writhes, and time slows, opens, thickens, until it feels like this is all that ever was or ever will be, scent and breath and motion and warmth in the dark.

He is still quiet when he comes, still thrusting in the same slow steady pace, but she can feel his cock pulsing, and he makes a low half-strangled noise deep in his chest that she feels more than hears, and his hands tighten on her hips. She strokes his back, his neck, his hair, flexing the muscles of her cunt to draw it from him, and the sound he makes becomes a real moan at last, a sound of surrender.

If it would change anything, if he wanted to hear it, she would say _I love you_ now. It’s near enough to true, and if either of them were an ordinary human she could say it. But she’s not anymore, and he never was, so instead she licks the sweat from his skin, and feels him slowly relax against her, and waits.

“Thank you,” he murmurs at last, letting go, letting his hands fall to her thighs. He kisses her, his mouth gentle against her torn lips, and smiles.

She braces her hands on his shoulders for balance, and rises off him, drawing him down to lie beside her. She opens her mouth, but the words she wants to say stick, and it takes a long minute before she can ask: “Will you stay?”

“For tonight,” he says, and his arms wrap around her, and he’s warm, his breathing soft and even, and she falls asleep feeling safe, feeling real.


End file.
